There's Not Much Role-Playing in Role-Playing Games These Days - Extra Punctuation

DeathSwitchCipher · 1時間前

He's not wrong especially with games like Fallout 4 and Mass Effect: Andromeda coming out with your character saying a line and those lines have little change on the outcome of a quest or story.

Do you wanna be a sarcastic snarker who quips no matter what and sounds like they were written while watching a Joss Whedon movie?

Or do you wanna sound like an ultra edgelord who will eat everyone's souls?

I'm exaggerating of course but it feels like that sometimes. Especially with Fallout 4's conversation system. I hope in the next Fallout game they either find a way to improve the conversation system or they go back to what worked better with Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Everyone else voiced except the player character.

acg_ · 1時間前

I think a more appropriate point would be to say there's not much role-playing in AAA games these days.

The CRPG genre is alive and well. Torment: Tides of Numenara, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, and Divinity: Original Sin are all really fun games (and really quite different from one another in many substantial ways), and the latter two are releasing sequels within the next year.

Additionally, the ARPG genre is still a part of the conversation. Diablo III, for all of its errors, is still one of the best selling games on the PC in history, and Path of Exile had nearly 25,000 players on it less than an hour ago.

I think people just need to acknowledge that the "casualization" of the RPG genre is really a AAA problem, and not an industry problem overall.

team56th · 1時間前

So I do agree with Yahtzee here - Rare case indeed but I fully agree. Alignments in D&D and other RPG rules started as a guideline for players to form their character. However in CRPG it ends up being a gameplay element and you have to choose certain dialogue options to keep your player at a certain alignment. It went against the system's original goal, the player expression. This was especially true with earlier Bioware games, and I did like how dialogue choices are spun out of gameplay stats in DA Inquision. But at the same time, this means the player expression does not have a significant (or any) effect on how the game will unfold. In the end the game becomes a crude amalgamation of Telltale adventures and XCOM/Gears of War/whatever the combat section is made of.

Somehow the game that I think that comes closest to tabletop experience is Hitman. The key here is that player expression and game progress are very closely connected yet nothing feels limited by it. If you want to play it low-key and suave you can do it. If you want to play a game of stealth you can do it. If you want to go bada-boom that is also possible. My moment-to-moment choices opened up new opportunities and different paths for progress.

Right now, I am imagining a level of Hitman, but with a Bioware/Telltale-esque dialogue wheel. It's just another tool for me to progress through the level, but a certain choice of lines based on previous information and situational awareness will get me somewhere important. Maybe that's the solution, as opposed to the oft-praised heavy prose in Obsidian or Larian RPGs. Dialogues in CRPG need to be functional and purposeful. Even if the line-by-line writing are a little scarce, arbitrary, or both, if dialogues serve as a key gameplay tool that opens up the next step for players, that could make the "true" RPG moment for video games.

WhirlyTwirlyMustache · 1時間前

They could learn a thing or two from Divinity. That had a great role playing system that worked even with multiple players.

belowthelaw · 1時間前

There are good rpgs. You just won't be asked to reserve them at GameStop. Torment, tyranny, divinity for example. They are all flawed in some way. But they give me a much more rpg feel than the usual triple A releases.

watchingcropsey2 · 2時間前

I can't say I disagree, I even felt like Witcher 3 was more of a Choose your own Adveture book than a true RPG.

stylepoints99 · 1時間前

Am I the only one that enjoys picking dialogue choices based on what I think is appropriate for my character in a given situation and just appreciating that moment of dialogue at the time?

I don't need "game systems" to hook into every time I stare at Cora's ass in MEA. Because, like the article mentioned, it's hard to fight the "gaminess" of such a situation.

If you want dialogue to matter more, you end up ballooning development costs and the size of a game. Some have tried it, like Tyranny, and it worked out okay, but in the end it was mostly window dressing and wasn't worth a second playthrough.

Most people will only see 1/3 (or one of however many choices you give) of your game if you go down that road. A good chunk of players don't even beat a game once, let alone go through several playthroughs. Is it worth it to a developer to develop content that only 1/3 of their players will ever see? Sure, some devs will try it as an experiment, but it's not going to happen in the AAA space for a while. One of the only games I know that did it in a major way was The Witcher 2. The second act was very different based on your choice at the end of act 1. I can't imagine something like that will become the norm.

DJ_IllI_Ill · 32分前

I actually blame voice acting for this problem. It's hard to design a branching storyline when voice acting costs money, and for some reason every game must have it now.

TheJoshider10 · 23分前

My biggest issue with role playing games is perfectly shown with The Witcher 3. I'm meant to be role playing as Geralt, the finest witcher in the land. Yet I begin as a level 1. I'm on par with many of my human enemies. I am not role playing as Geralt, because Geralt would be massively ahead of these guys.

I wish with role playing games that if there is an established character, there's a difficulty setting literally called "role play". I want to be able to one or two shot characters who are level 1 from the start of the game if i'm someone like Geralt. Fuck difficulty, I want the role play. I hate having to "level up" my character because it's a game and thus it must fall under the gaming conventions. If it does need some gameplay hook, then the Wild Hunt should be incredibly difficult to defeat, same with some monsters. These should be raised in level and vary depending on the area, but many humans should be far below my skill level as Geralt.

It's a problem that won't be fixed though because it's a video game, and RPG means the generic "start at the bottom of the levelling up system" despite the fact that if we're role playing as these characters, much of the time our character should already be "levelled up".

At the very least, just let me be able to do this. Not everyone would want it, and I see why. But for games like The Witcher that have a preset character who is experienced and well known for their skill, I want to feel like them from the start, not feel dumbed down and lose my immersion due to gaming conventions.

illgot · 1時間前

Back when Ultima Online was released in the mid 90s people would RP all the time in that game. It was an open world game, people could retrain their skills relatively easy and outfits were simple to change.

You could dress up and role play a tribal savage one day, witch the next, knight the next. Whole guilds had their specific theme.

Then games like Everquest came out which began degrading peoples choices on how they look or how their characters were built due to classes and long grinds. It soon became standard to have classes define your character instead of role playing and making your abilities fit what you wanted to role play.

I'm still waiting for skill systems similar to Ultima Online to come back (hell, a lot of features UO had no MMO to this date has done fully).

Role Play was killed by telling the player what they will be via the class system or what they will do via stringent quest systems.

Deadly_Ghost · 1時間前

I find it odd that this is an issue at all. The very nature of a role playing game is that you are playing the role of character with some personality. Sadly we don't live in an age of AI that can basically hand craft a story around every choice you may make, and, even then that would be highly unrealistic as, in reality, the choices we make are limited, as are the results. We like to think that every choice we make is going to have some lasting impact as it appeals to our sense of ego, but it is not only not feasible for development purposes(until the rise of our AI overlords), but also not feasible in design in general. The simple fact is some choices simply don't matter and that is okay. It's better to have a good story than choices, but if you can do both go for it, either way it doesn't mean every action and decision the player makes should have a noticeable effect beyond the mechanics of the game.

Also love how this comes from the concept of the player Godhead. A player who knows what they know only because they have experienced the story multiple times in "parallel universes." Come to think of it, this very well may be what the Lutece twins from Bioware Infinite are talking about with their "Constants and Variables" quote. The nature of video game development where you give players choices within the narrative.

Nan0machines · 1時間前

Felt the same way for a while now.

Madden is more of an RPG than Final Fantasy is. How did this happen?

Taskforcem85 · 49分前

I actually like the way ARPGs are evolving. I think the D&D type RPG works well for top down turn based games, Tyranny/PoE, as you can simply do a lot more with the scope of these games. However your ME/TES/FO4 require a lot more attention to detail simply because of how the gameplay and camera works. They're much more personal games. You're meant to attach yourself to the world and feel like you're apart of it. That's why I think a focus on developing the main character and their allies rather than massive decisions works better.

However, and this is a big however, ARPGs are doing a pretty poor job of making these choices of personality matter though. You're given a lot of options to say something a certain way, and it's nice that these choices feel consistent, but the choice will last for 1-2 lines of conversation before it disappears. DA2 is a good example of how to do it correctly. As you start to lean towards a personality type your character begins to act like that, and other characters react differently to that personality type. It could be improved on quite a bit, but imo it has the correct groundwork setup.

floodster · 25分前

Telltale would fit the bill too, their games are about choices (even if the choices lead to nothing sometimes) and how you get to roleplay your character. That's a lot more RPG to me than dumping numbers into stats.

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